Press Room

Taipei, Taiwan, 14 October 2003 – Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Group (ASE; TAIEX:2311, NYSE: ASX) today announced to rename its facility in Singapore. ISE Labs Singapore Pte Ltd is now known as ASE Singapore Pte Ltd., making it formally a branch office of ASE in Singapore. The move is aimed to provide a more integrated supply chain with real-time services and to meet the customers’ needs of semiconductor packaging and testing in Southeast Asia (also known as the ASEAN cluster).

As an extended arm and expansion of ASE Malaysia, ASE Singapore has been noted for its technology in front-end testing, with wafer sort in particular. The synergism of ASE Malaysia and ASE Singapore dwells in the geographical proximity, with warehousing in Singapore as the distribution hub. ASE Singapore will be working even more closely with ASE Malaysia after renaming, forming a total semiconductor manufacturing supply chain from front-end testing to back-end IC packaging and testing.

Such integration will stand to help shorten the entire manufacturing process for customers as well as to ensure high yield rates and reliability of chip output. This benefits customers by speeding up their time-to-market and enabling their quality of manufacturing to be finely controlled.

“There are tremendous synergies in identifying the facility as an ASE site,” said Lee Kwai Mun, General Manager, ASE Singapore. “ISE Labs Inc., the largest integrated circuit laboratory in Silicon Valley, California, is known for its strength in test engineering solutions. ASE Test is the world largest independent provider of semiconductor testing services with worldwide operations in Taiwan, United States, Hong Kong and Malaysia, ” Lee Kwai Mun further pointed out, “The operation in Malaysia also offers packaging services. Thus, tapping into the vast engineering resources of ISE Labs, ASE Singapore is now well positioned to support full turnkey solutions in test development, assembly and testing. We want to distinguish ASE Singapore as a major site for semiconductor test services in the world.”

K. Kanapathi, President of ASE Malaysia & Singapore said, “ASE Malaysia’s customers are evenly distributed in consumer electronics and communications. Renaming helps reinforce resource integration within the ASE Group and to further stress the benefit that the wafers can be sorted in Singapore and then packaged in Malaysia in the same vicinity. It will assure more efficient supply chain, turnkey service and quick logistic support for our regional customers.

Endowed with sophisticated technological capabilities on front-end testing of IC chips, ASE Singapore provides test development, wafer probe and IC packaged test services to semiconductor companies. Its customer base includes some of the largest Integrated Device Manufactures (IDM), and offers vast experience in mixed-signal and RF testing with a range of sophisticated test platforms. Complementarily, ASE Malaysia fares excellently in providing cost effective low pincount packaging with services in SO, PDIP, low cost QFN (20-60 pincount), Wafer Level CSP (20 pincount or below).